If, as Oscar Wilde said, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, is online piracy the sincerest form of fandom? There seems to be no slowing down of illegal downloading of movies, TV shows and music. Just last week came news of a massive leak of new movies (including The Hateful Eight and The Revenant), and within days hundreds of thousands of ripped DVD files had been downloaded. TorrentFreak has announced the most popular pirated downloads of 2015. Game of Thrones is massively popular; for the fourth consecutive year, HBO’s fantasy series is the most pirated TV show with more than 14 million downloads. Last April, HBO tried everything, including blood magic, probably, to prevent piracy — alas, neither the old gods nor the new gods could stop it.
Other shows on TorrentFreak’s list include The Walking Dead, The Big Bang Theory, Arrow, and The Flash. The most torrented movie? Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. Almost 48 million people downloaded a copy of it. Second on the list was Furious 7.
